


Driver Choses The Music

by inkvoices



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F-word, Gen, Mild Self Harm, Post-Avengers (2012), Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 15:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7897396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkvoices/pseuds/inkvoices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint shoves his bag in the trunk of the car – a standard, bland SHIELD undercover ride – and doesn’t ask how Nat acquired the keys.  Doesn’t ask how, or even <i>if</i>, she’s gotten permission to take him off base, doesn’t ask what’s in the bag she shoved in his arms on their way out, doesn’t ask what they’re doing in a SHIELD garage at ass o’clock in the morning.  Doesn’t care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Driver Choses The Music

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SugarFey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey/gifts).



> SugarFey prompted 'ROAD TRIP' at the 2016 be_compromised Promptathon and I remembered that I had the start of a fic from way back when, post-Avengers, somewhere on my computer. So I found it and rewrote it into this.

Clint shoves his bag in the trunk of the car – a standard, bland SHIELD undercover ride – and doesn’t ask how Nat acquired the keys. Doesn’t ask how, or even _if_ , she’s gotten permission to take him off base, doesn’t ask what’s in the bag she shoved in his arms on their way out, doesn’t ask what they’re doing in a SHIELD garage at ass o’clock in the morning. Doesn’t care.

Nat slides into the driver’s seat without any argument from him. 

There’d been that one time Clint drove when they were on a job together and mayhem had ensued, which absolutely wasn’t his fault, but Nat hasn’t let him behind the wheel since. Unless mayhem is required. But he always has to push, always has to point out he can fly _jets_ and that’s _way more complicated_ and _who’s the best pilot here?_ And she’ll reply with the fact that she’s _fully aware_ of how complicated it is to fly a jet since he’s not the _only_ pilot here, and how airspace comes without all those pesky things like traffic lights and one-way systems that Clint seems to feel are optional.

Not today though. Today he gets into the passenger seat, sliding a pair of sunglasses onto his face before he buckles up. Big, black, reflective lenses, not prescription thankfully.

He’s not saying anything. Not to the head shrinks, not to the higher ups, not _allowed_ to talk to the families of those he killed, and Nat is not going to be his exception.

“Those aren’t yours,” says Natasha, glancing at him as she checks the mirrors – even though there’s no else around – before backing out. 

They’re not. People shouldn’t leave things lying around on their desks where anyone could just walk by and take them. People shouldn’t be so damn trusting.

 

Clint can stay silent for a long time if needs must, watching and waiting. He rarely choses to if it’s not necessary, because why sit in silence when you can have some quality comm banter? But he _can_ be quiet. His record up to now had been a solo three day mission in Way North Alaska in winter, when it was so damn cold it wasn’t worth uncovering the lower half of his face just to hear his own voice. 

Now is a whole new record: he’s got nothing to say.

And the thing is, it’s become a personal superstition. If he can stop himself from doing something, from talking, then that proves he’s in control. If he can stop himself it means he’s _capable_ of stopping himself and if he doesn’t then what follows is his own fucking fault. 

It’s harder with nothing to focus on though. No target, no other people, just his pale reflection in the window and the world blurring by beyond. Well, there’s the driver, but he doesn’t want Natasha’s attention. Doesn’t need it.

Clint reaches forward to fiddle with the radio, hoping for a decent country music station or maybe one of those guess the year from ten tunes things, but gets nothing, not even static. When he pulls it out to take a proper look at it he finds that the back has been pried off and all the components have been yanked out.

“Nat?” he asks, her name just slipping out, force of habit and so damn easy. He frowns and presses the pad of his index finger to the sharp end of a protruding wire, watches the blood well up.

“Driver choses the music,” she says. 

Clint shoves the radio unit back into its slot perhaps a bit more violently than is necessary. But only a bit.

“I removed all the tackers and bugs too, if that makes you feel any better.”

It doesn’t. His skin itches with the knowledge that it’s possible no one knows where they are. 

It’s also, always, possible that she’s playing him. The thing where the words coming out of her mouth are an exact truth, but not the whole truth. Like maybe she took all the SHIELD trackers out but put her own in. Or she could be carrying one, or have some other method of checking in.

Clint hopes. And that’s an itchy feeling as well.

 

Scenery passes by. He stretches his legs out and considers kicking off his boots to prop his feet up on the dashboard, like they would when they were kids and the circus was on the road. Might as well get comfy. 

“You dare,” says Nat calmly, her eyes not leaving the road ahead, “and I’ll make that seventeen stitches slash on your thigh look like a paper cut.”

 

They stop once for a toilet break and to fill the car up. Natasha grabs some bottled water and gas station snack food and comes back to find him in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel. 

The keys are still in her pocket. 

He could hotwire it. Wasn’t going to.

She opens the door wide, says, “You didn’t crash into anything when you were under Loki’s influence.”

His grip tightens on the steering wheel.

“What Loki wanted, you gave him. When I, on the other hand, want you to drive in a straight line and obey the traffic laws you careen all over the place.”

“It’s called dodging bullets,” he tells her, because she won’t stop if he doesn’t start. His voice is rough, rusty, dredged up from a dark place and he’s glad she can’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, that he has some small measure of privacy right now. He swallows, tongue thick in his mouth, and adds, “Defensive driving.”

She waits patiently until he can peel his fingers off the wheel, skin sticking to the leather in the summer heat, until he can get out. She offers him space and a bottle of water, cold and the condensation mixes with the sweat on his palms.

“If you’d had a choice – if you’d been helping him – then you would still have been _you_ , terrible driving and all. You didn’t and you weren’t.”

He wants to tell her that she has no idea what she’s talking about, that she’s wrong, but that’s just because he wants her to be and he can’t throw that in her face. She knows better than anyone about choice.

“You weren’t you at all,” she says calmly and gets back in the car.

He could run. Could hitch a ride, steal a car, but he won’t.

 

They spend the night in a motel, Nat paying with a personal credit card embossed with ‘Natasha Romanoff’ – the closest thing she has to a real identity. Easy to trace if SHIELD, or anyone else, is looking.

“So we’re legit on this trip?” Clint asks, eyes down and focussed on the room card he flips over and over between his fingers. 

“Does it matter?”

He still doesn’t care, refuses to, but he doesn’t need her dragged down with him for trying, in her own way, to help.

 

They have a twin room on the second floor with a view of the car park from the walkway. There’s a generic art print of a cow, a TV that’s more than a few years old, plain white sheets and pale yellow walls.

Clint claims the bed furthest from the window and door whilst Nat uses the bathroom, dumping his duffle bag on top and unzipping to find clean underwear, clean t-shirts, socks, a spare pair of jeans, toiletries, all from his locker at the New York base. She’s added a James Bond novel and gauze wound dressings. 

No weapons, nothing sharp, not even a disposable razor. Even though her own duffle is _right there_ by the door and he’s willing to bet it contains at least three knives and a Glock.

 _Don’t be stupid_ , that gesture says and, _I trust you if you trust me to have your back._

They read each other so easily, makes him wonder why she’s so keen for him to fucking speak.

He leaves his boxers and t-shirt on to sleep in, takes a leak and brushes his teeth, avoids his own eyes in the mirror.

The glasses have to come off. It’s one thing to wear them when it’s so early that it’s still dark or after the sun has gone down, that’s a look. A look that screams dickhead, but it’s a _look_ and that’s something he can get away with. Sleeping in sunglasses though, no one does that.

Nat’s already turned the lights off when he goes back into the bedroom. That helps.

 

Clint can’t sleep. Nothing new. Nothing to do with the heat; sheets shoved to the foot of the bed and the ceiling fan an overhead irritant. He leans back on the wall, cool against his skin, with his knees pulled up, elbows propped on top of them and hands dangling loose between, watching Nat’s silhouette rise and fall with her breathing.

“Do I have to knock you out?” 

He snorts, amused despite himself.

“Talk to me, Clint,” she says in the dark. At a normal volume, not in any late night confessional tone.

“And say what?”

“Anything.”

But he’s got nothing to say. Really.

“I can, and have, beaten you in a fight,” Nat adds conversationally, shifting so that she’s lying on her side facing him. “More than once.”

“So that’s what we’re going to do now?” He draws his hands back in, restless. Places his palms just below his knees and pushes out, feels his arm and leg muscles tighten. “Any time I need it you’re going to knock me back into myself, gods and monsters be damned, is that how this works?”

“If that’s how it needs to be.”

“Fuck,” he bites out, teeth clenched together, dropping his head back against the wall with a dull thump.

“Clint, if I have to hit you in the head every day for the rest of our lives, I will,” Nat says. “I promise not to enjoy it too much.”

He laughs, can’t help it, and it cracks down the middle into this awful little sob that he can’t help either. 

Natasha doesn’t know how to hug people. She never did get much practise at it. But she comes to sit next to him, leans into him, her side warm against his. And when he tilts his head to rest on her shoulder she doesn’t move away. 

 

He drowns the sunglasses in the morning. Fills the sink and leaves them there.

Two blank lenses staring up.

 

“Where are we even going?” Clint asks.

Nat stretches a hand out behind him, keeping one hand on the wheel and her eyes still on the road, and pulls out a road atlas from the pocket at the back of his seat. She tosses it on his lap and returns both hands to the wheel.

Clint gives it a once-over, but there are no bookmarks, no page corners turned down or particularly worn folds, nothing to indicate their destination.

He’d raise his eyebrows in a question, but she won’t look at him when she’s occupied by the road.

“Nat?” he tries.

“Pick somewhere.”

“What?” 

Clint flips through the pages of the book confused, not looking at any of them. 

“A place to go, Clint.”

“We don’t have one?” His hands still and he groans. “Shit, Nat, tell me you weren’t just driving to nowhere until I said something?”

She doesn’t reply. She does smirk.

“Shit,” says Clint again.

Natasha wrestles her face into a serious expression and says, sagely, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”

“You get that out of a fortune cookie?”

He turns pages, traces roads and rivers, but it’s a while before he picks somewhere. After breakfast at a greasy spoon diner. He doesn’t feel hungry, but he could eat and they do good bacon.

“There,” he says, stabbing a finger at a spot on the other side of the country, to see if she’ll drive that far. To see how far she’ll go before she stops.


End file.
